Posts Tagged ‘insurance’

“Republicans could try again to repeal Obamacare if they win enough seats in U.S. elections next month, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday, calling a failed 2017 push to repeal the healthcare law a ‘disappointment.’

In a forecast of 2019 policy goals tempered by uncertainty about who would win the congressional elections, McConnell blamed social programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, for the fast-rising national debt.”

“They spend like an hour, ‘we’re going to repeal Obamacare.’ Okay. And then what are you gonna do? Well, then we’re going to repeal it and we’re going to give you something great. Okay. What? Well, something.”

“You watch the press conference and what you realize is they got no plan. They want to repeal because ideologically they’re opposed to the idea of helping these 20 million people get health insurance. It’s not like they don’t even have a pretense of a plan. They don’t even have a semblance of a plan. There’s not even a hint of a plan. Not even a mote. Not even a—there’s no plan. Nothing, zero, nada.”

Before leaving DC for their usual four-day weekend, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and replace it with … nothing. Don’t panic, you still have health insurance; the president quickly vetoed the GOP bill.

While this is the first time the Senate passed such a bill, the GOP-dominated House has voted to repeal the ACA sixty-two times.

Last week the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging held a hearing on “What the US Health Care System Can Learn from Other Countries.” Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina knows all about health care, probably due to his distinguished career selling lawnmowers. Mr. Burr made the usual counter-factual GOP assertions about healthcare delivery, thinly disguised as questions to Dr. Danielle Martin, MD, Vice-President of Medical Affairs & Health System Solutions at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital. Dr. Martin immediately administered reality therapy (above).

Senator Burr: “On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year? Do you know?”

Dr. Martin: “I don’t, sir, but I know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.”

More:

“Watch an expert teach a smug U.S. senator about Canadian healthcare,” Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times

“This isn’t a plan to ‘replace Obamacare.’ It’s a plan to do the opposite of replacing Obamacare. It’s as if I said I had a plan to fix the house by replacing the leaky roof, and you said you had a plan to fix the house by getting rid of the roof.”

Will “ObamaCare” kill jobs? The new Affordable Care Act healthcare reform law is modeled after the Massachusetts healthcare law, “RomneyCare,” and the Urban Institute recently studied the situation there. So has RomneyCare killed jobs in Massachusetts?

It’s that time again. The leaves are turning bright autumn colors, and lovesick deer on the road to romance are finding it crowded with motor vehicles. There are more deer and cars in the U.S. than ever before, so the situation isn’t as amusing as it might initially seem. Deer cause car crashes that kill about 200 people in the US each year, twice as many as Hurricane Sandy. State Farm Insurance says deer collided with 1.23 million vehicles between July 2011 and June 2012, 7.7 percent more than last year. The company’s claims from deer collisions rose almost 8 percent while those for other collisions fell 8.5 percent.